Isabel could remember one night out on Shelter, a visit shortly before her mother died, when Madison had been angry. They’d had some fight, not even a fight, surely it had been minor. Madison dropped a glass while clearing the table, or left the suede ballet flats she’d begged for all summer outside during an afternoon thunderstorm. Something like that. And Isabel had responded, she felt certain, with an appropriate level of censure. She’d yelled at her daughter, yes, but nothing out of line.
A few hours later she’d been upstairs, calling the city from the hall phone. She looked down and saw her mother out by the pool, walking to its far end. Madison was on the edge, her feet in the water. Her shoulders were shaking. And Isabel’s mother walked right over, without pause, and slipped her feet out of their kitten heels. She sat down next to her granddaughter, put one hand to her back, and just left it there while Madison shook with sobs. She stayed there until Madison folded, until she allowed her grandmother to wrap her in both arms, kissing the very top of her head.
Presumably, at some point when the hysteria had died down, they’d spoken. Isabel didn’t know. She had already walked away from the window by then. And it bothered her for days, the way this closeness had skipped a generation, until it occurred to her: the same thing that had revealed this painful truth had also suggested its salve. Someday, Madison would have a daughter, a girl Isabel might be able to draw close without question, without pause. It wasn’t too late for Isabel, not entirely.
She’d thought about that often, this year. How easy it might be, to hug Madison’s daughter one day.
But now, Madison was standing in the middle of the kitchen. She looked like an open wound. We were worried, Isabel had said.
She began to walk toward her daughter. Every part of Madison’s body recoiled from her approach, but still Isabel walked toward her.
“Are you okay?”
Madison stood completely still, and looked at no one.
“Are you all right,” Isabel repeated.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t mean that. I’m talking about Chip, Madison. Did anything else happen?”
“Oh,” Madison said. “Chip is great. Chip’s life will keep going and he’s not going to think about me ever again. I have had absolutely zero effect on anything Chip thinks about the world.”
“Madison, what—”
“I can’t believe him,” her daughter cried. “I can’t believe him.”
Madison bent at the waist, just as she had when she was a thick-armed toddler with a sharp pain in her stomach. She dropped her purse to the floor, crossed her arms over her breasts. She allowed herself to be pulled, with one arm, into her mother’s chest. She allowed herself to be held.
Lily looked at them, then looked back at the folders on the table.
“I’ll take them with me,” she murmured.
Isabel shook her head again. She bent her neck to speak directly into her daughter’s ear.
“Do you want Lily to stay?”
Madison buried her head more deeply in Isabel’s chest.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t be proud like that, and act like you know better than every other idiot, and then also be a liar.”
“I know, sweetheart. I know. We can discuss this later.”
But her daughter barreled on.
“I thought I knew,” Madison said. “I thought I knew more—I thought I had all the pieces. He made it sound like he was telling me everything.”
“I know,” Isabel said. “I know how it must have seemed.”
“But it was going on the whole time?”
Isabel didn’t answer, and Madison erupted with a fresh sob.
“I thought I had all this inside information that other people were too stupid to see,” she said. “I thought people hated him because they were jealous. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
It was the repetition, most of all, that made her seem so young, so lost, that seemed to shrink her before her mother’s very eyes. It was the senseless repetition of a useless phrase that stirred Isabel’s anger, like a cold object tossed into boiling water.
“I can take her upstairs,” Lily said.
“No,” Isabel said. “There’s nothing more to do, Lily. You should go to bed yourself.”
“But I can stay.” Lily looked again at the folders on the table.
“But we don’t need you to,” Isabel said, letting the chill creep into her voice. She could indulge this for a few minutes more, Lily’s desire to feel central to the solution, but after that she’d be issuing an order, not an invitation.
Lily was clearly angry, but she had no other choice, she knew that as well as Isabel did. She left through the mud room.
Isabel waited for Madison to gather herself, to wipe at her cheeks. She offered Madison her hand and they walked upstairs. Madison let herself be undressed, let her mother slide the white nightgown over her arms, sat still while Isabel wiped at her makeup with a moist washcloth. Isabel could see her capitulation, could see the relief flood her limbs, and felt a pang at having denied Madison something for which she clearly had such a hunger, such a need. Her daughter didn’t care that she was being comforted by someone equally furious. She just wanted the comfort itself.
Isabel turned off the light and crawled into bed beside Madison.
“Did Lily show you that stuff?” Madison asked, only once. Isabel nodded, pressed her lips to her daughter’s hair.
“Dad was lying to me, wasn’t he?” Madison continued. “That stuff doesn’t prove anything, does it? He lied to me. So many times, Mom, we talked about it. I asked him the exact question, and he lied to me so many times.”
“Go to sleep.”
“He kept acting like he didn’t deserve what was happening,” Madison said. “But nothing bad has even happened to him yet. He just wanted me to be on his side already, before anything happened. He just didn’t want to feel guilty.”
“Sleep, Madison,” Isabel said. “Just sleep on it, for tonight.”
Madison spoke only once more, her words wisps into the dark room, before she fell asleep.
“I thought I got to see this version of him no one else knew about,” she said.
Isabel stayed there until daylight was beginning to stain the sky just at the edges of the trees out back. She’d forgotten how pretty it was, the view from this bedroom. That was how long it had been, she thought with pain, since she’d come in here to be with her daughter.
In the end, Madison had been the one who’d taken best to life in Connecticut, wedged somewhere between city and country, between wildness and the manicured. Her daughter loved it there; it was her home.
That’s what we’re robbing her of, and it will come entirely as a shock to her. None of this was ever a gamble, for her. This was her home.
Isabel went back down to the kitchen. She sat at the table, with the papers, for nearly two more hours. She did not read everything, but she read a great deal. She understood most of it, not all. She recognized some of the names, some of the e-mail addresses, and others were unknown to her. There was nothing there that could remain a secret for long; that seemed clear. If he thought he could bury any of it, he was dreaming. It was just a question of timing, and proof. It was only a question of who would get this information, and how quickly.